First playable

 In all fairness I don't think my game can labelled as a 'first playable' just yet. It has only been the second week of starting our game project and I genuinely feel like I have encountered more issues than made much progress.😅

I should probably begin by saying that majority of my time was spent updating my GDD (link here) with the assets and tutorials that closely matched what I am hoping to achieve for my original game idea. In addition, changes were made to challenges and obstacles of the game. This week's unity tutorials which included the powerup mechanic and having enemies follow the player were especially useful as I am looking to incorporated these mechanics in my game as well. 

Now, getting back to talking about the actually game. I must say, it's starting to look like one of those messy challenges we must complete at the end of each Unity tutorial. 

Screenshot of my current progress with the game

Camera Movement

Adjusting the camera was my first task. The idea is to have the player rotate the camera around the character. This is similar to this week's Unity tutorials where the camera rotates around a focal point. In this case, I tried to make the player itself the focal point by adding the camera as child object of the player. 

This somewhat works. The view seems clearer when you get to rotate the camera rather than having it stuck in one place. However, if you rotate the whole way around, you will eventually lose track of the character and the view almost shifts from third to first person. 

I can't really find the root of the issue, yet. I tried adjusting the camera's position, but it didn't seem to work. I'm beginning to wonder if this has to do which the fact that I'm using the same horizontal input for the player to rotate left and right as well as the camera. 

Player Movement

The jump mechanic was included. This seemed tricky at the start as my player object is empty and I needed to create individual scripts for each of the child animal game objects for it to work. Although, strangely enough the only force I am able to use is Impulse, otherwise pressing space to jump won't work. I also got rid of the player exploit where they could press multiple times to jump while still in the air. 

Next, I was looking to see if I could set triggers and conditions for certain animations to create an idle, walk, run and eat. The animation tree looked different from the Unity tutorials so I spent some looking for the animations clips that appeared missing but were placed in a different folder. Some animation parameters were missing, but I figured out how to create them, particularly the 'trigger' which seemed useful.

I managed to set the 'idle' as the default animation. The idea was to enable the 'walking' animation when the player used the 'w' key.  However, that didn't seem to work. Perhaps, I need to target the horizontal input again?

Powerups

I began setting up a powerup for the player. So far the only interaction is that when player moves over it, the powerup disappears from the scene. I still need to look into the idea if I can create HP bars and add damage numbers in the game. This will dictate whether I want the powerups to orientate towards regaining some missing health or increase movement speed instead. 

There is a small issue with gravity I encountered later as well, where the characters seem to just fall off the plane... It may be a simple check/unchecked box which, I will need to look into as well. 

I know I need to pickup the pace. I'm hoping to work on the game bit by bit each day rather than in one session as that does take a lot of  time and energy. I'm not gonna lie, I'm starting to have some doubts on the finished game, but I'll try and stay positive for now. 🤞